First of all, us is mostly me, Pat Powers, aka a lot of other names, but that's just a matter for me and various law enforcement agencies. (Seriously, I'm not going to reveal my real name because I have some hopes of continuing to find work in fields that don't involve writing about hentai (not that there's anything wrong with that).)

I am a writer and editor who has spent most of his career editing publications which are designed not to offend anybody. The problem with such publications is that they also do not interest anybody whose name does not appear in them regularly. So I thought I'd write something interesting so my creative juices, such as they are, didn't dry up and blow away.

I am not a comics fan, nor a cartoon fan, nor a manga fan, nor a mainstream anime fan. I've always been a hardcore SF fan, reading all the novels and short stories I could find as a teen, often at a one-book-a-day rate in summer and continuing at a less blistering pace -- nowadays, a considerably less blistering pace since I will no longer read crap just because it's SF crap.

I saw all the usual Saturday morning toons as a kid and liked them OK, but I don't remember being particularly smitten with any of them, not even the Jetsons. Then anime starting hitting American markets in the form of titles like Astro Boy, Speed Racer and Gatchaman (aka Battle of the Planets). I checked them out because they were different, and after you've seen the Hanna Barbera stuff that dominated American TV in the 70s and 80s, you are REALLY interested in anything that's different from that crap.

These anime served to convince me that anime, too, was crap, badly animated series of childish plotlines, featuring vaguely retarded characters that behaved so unnaturally that they're funny. Gatchaman especially seemed to consist entirely of people shooting at each other in space, causing huge explosions and generally behaving like idiots at all times.

I missed a lot of good stuff that way, I know, but I also avoided having to wade through an awful lot of crap to get at it. So it's kind of a draw. But considering how many bad anime there are out there, it's a draw I win.

I finally tumbled to the potential of hentai several years ago when I noticed a used video store near where my wife worked. I checked it out one day, looking for bargains. Turned out that it was a used XXX video store, and that also did a lot of biz as a XXX used magazine store, with box after box of obscure adult mags stored in plastic wrappers, just like what you'd find in the used section of a comic store. That's right, used copies of "Big Hooter Babes Suck Humongous Cocks" was its stock in trade, along with used videos like "Double Anal Gangbang."

And there was the same crew of vaguely obsessed looking guys poring over the mags and the videos that you might find at a comic book store, looking like they hoped to discover the secrets of the universe somewhere inside those XXX mags and tapes.

The store did have a rack of ordinary videos of the sort that you might find in video stores -- probably stuff that had been picked up secondhand from a mainstream video store for cheap, just so the store could claim that it was a regular video store and not an entirely adult business. (Though one look at the place would have blown its cover. I think it was a legal thing, like those tiny patches of cloth at the bottom of a thong bikini that keep women from being naked in public.)

I wasn't all that interested in the used XXX stuff because there were no bondage titles in the videos or the mags, and besides, to borrow a phrase from teenage girls, ewwwwwwwwww. (And I'm glad I wasn't because I had yet to read about the somewhat uncouth habits of guys who rent adult videotapes at the True Porn Clerk Stories blog and if I'd read that blog after handling one of those tapes, I'd have to spend a little while compulsively washing my hands. Maybe a long while.)

But the regular videos were a different matter. Not likely to be "used" in the same way the adult tapes were. And there's nothing like the thrill of picking up a gem of a film like Vicious Circles or Fatal Conflict for a couple of bucks on some forgotten video store shelf.

I managed to do just that, thought I didn't know it at the time. I picked up a couple of anime that were on sale because Mrs. Powers liked them, along with a couple of promising-looking B movies for me.

I gave the anime to Mrs. Powers. Later that day she said, "I really think you ought to watch this one. You'll like it a lot."

So I sat down and watched it, and pretty soon my eyes started bugging out, because I was seeing images of a bound, naked cartoon chick getting fucked. A lot. And then another naked, bound cartoon chick getting fucked. And later on, another.

It was a little title called Fencer of Minerva.

It wasn't just that I had never seen anything like this in a cartoon before, I had seen nothing like it at all before. Sexual bondage imagery that involved a woman actually getting fucked while bound was very rare and tended to be very sloppily done when you could find it, even on the Internet. By that I mean, there were a VERY few images that could be found on Usenet, most of them clearly either from the 70s when explicit sexual bondage imagery hadn't yet been shut down, or from Europe where it wasn't under US censorship strictures. In any event, there wasn't that much of either.

And the stuff from the 70s was clearly done by vanilla XXX filmmakers who'd just added it in to be doing "something kinky" -- they clearly had no feel for the dynamic that drives sexual bondage imagery. This stuff was clearly made by someone who knew what they were doing. In fact, in a review of Fencer of Minerva that I later wrote, I called Fencer the closest thing there was to an animated Gor novel, a call I'm still very comfortable with after seeing a lot of other hentai (though, to be fair, I did miss out on the very low quality of the dubbing in "Fencer" which is bad even for hentai, and that's saying something.)

After that I developed a great interest in Japanese adult anime, as you might imagine. After a bit of poking around looking for a good source, we found a local comic shop that had a fully stocked anime DVD rental operation going, which included plenty of hentai. This was wonderful news -- not for nothing do anime fans have bumper stickers and T-shirts with legends that read: "Anime: Drugs would be cheaper."

We started going to the rental store every week, and still do. My wife likes her mainstream anime (and some of my hentai -- generally the more artful, tasteful ones as you might imagine) and our kid likes his mainstream manga, while I surreptitiously slip an adult title into the rental pile. Works for everyone, and has also led to the acquisition, over several years, of the Pat Powers Keyboard Cheerleading Team. That's almost two hudred dollars worth of action figures (no, not dolls, they're NOT DOLLS, I tell you!) you're looking at, if they were bought new at full retail. Which of course hasn't happened because I'm a patient guy and can wait for markdowns, and the collectors are into figures that can't move (dolls, I believe they're called) so the prices stay relatively low on these babies.

Since then, I've seen hundreds of hentai, which in Japan would surely make me a pervert, but not here in America because, um, er, uhhhhhh ... I do it for research purposes only. Yeah, that's it! Research purposes! (OK, this sounds feeble even to me, but it's the best I've got.)

Prior to starting up Hentai Revue, I had a website that featured reviews of movies that had bondage themes, or contained bondage imagery, or were based on works with bondage themes but which had little or no bondage in them (a surprisingly common occurrence, I discovered). That's basically where I'm coming from as a reviewer -- a guy who understands the appeal of sexual bondage, has reviewed mainstream movies that feature sexuaL bondage, and finds hentai an improvement over those mainstream movies.

I enjoyed reviewing mainstream films with bondage imagery because they are so weirdly and badly done. The people who do bondage in mainstream films show every indication of understanding only one aspect of bondage scenes, if they understand any aspect of them. It's like the story of the three blind men who encounter an elephant, feel up parts of it, and identify it as three different animals, none of them elephant-like. If you don't understand the particular appeal of sexual bondage, it's very difficult to know how to do it properly.

Hentai are polar opposites of mainstream bondage films. Their creators have the same direct and natural understanding of bondage imagery that the people who create bondage porn have, but they also create stories and characters, unlike bondage porn filmmakers, sometimes quite interesting ones.

Hentai, in short, are everything I've ever looked for in porn -- everything that mainstream films that include bondage imagery aren't, and should be, and everything that bondage porn isn't, and should be. Except that they are cartoons and not live action, a situation that has its advantages as well as its disadvantages, as I've explained in Why Hentai Are So Damn Good and in Why Hentai Are So Damn Bad.

This is why I enjoy reviewing hentai -- unlike American mainstream, they often feature strong bondage themes, the bondage is well done, and is integrated into an actual story, unlike American bondage porn , which rarely features a story more complex than "Boss Ties Up Secretary (er, Administrative Assistant.)" To put it simply, with hentai there is something to be examined, both in terms of bondage and in terms of plot. And right now, with very few exceptions, hentai is the only game in town.

By reviewing hentai I hope to eventually achieve world domination and rule mankind (especially the womanly part of mankind) with an iron grip. There are a lot of details to be worked out along the way, such as all of them, but hey, it's a plan.